Re:Grumpy: Go running Python
by thedjinn on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @12:57PM
(#13320457)
I'm curious to why they started this project when there already is low hanging fruit that can speed up Python (e.g. pypy). What makes this better other than to satisfy the inner go-fanboy?
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Because they want to get off of Python completely, and forever. They're not looking for speed, they're looking to ditch the liability of supporting Python and its ecosystem.
Yeah, they didn't at all say that.
Re:Grumpy: Go running Python
by randomdata on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @07:30PM
(#13323596)
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean it is not true. There are many reasons why Google may not want to reveal long-term plans so explicitly.
It's clear that existing Python codebases will be maintained for the foreseeable future – there would be no reason to build this otherwise – but this may signify a shift away from Python for new extensions to the project, as this now makes it possible to integrate Go packages with relative ease.
It's right there in the post:
> To solve this problem, we investigated a number of other Python runtimes. Each had trade-offs and none solved the concurrency problem without introducing other issues.
Pypy still has a GIL. GIL-free seems to be one of the explicit goals of this project.
>Pypy still has a GIL.
Not strictly true, http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/stm.html. In general for the main project however, this is true.
Pypy still has a gil. Pypy is experimenting with non-GILed versions, and in fact there are people actively working to remove the GIL from pypy. But the same can be said of cpython (the gilectomy), and yet I don't think that you'd say "not strictly true" to "cpython still has a GIL".